Hearing recordings of your own words can make you painfully aware just how much of a disconnect there is between the things you think you’re saying, and the words that are actually coming out of your mouth. Sometimes it’s a simple slip of the tongue – saying “must” instead of “much”. Sometimes it’s a slip of the mind – there has been a lot of times where I’ve said “Draco” rather than “Harry”, or vice versa. While clear communication is certainly primarily the concern of the communicator, I’ve come to realize how important it is to have a charitable audience that helps with the translation. Talking to a hostile audience probably makes inferential distances far worse, as they are no longer working with you to bridge those gaps.
In today’s episode there was a line I simply omitted. An entire line that I thought I’d read out loud, but had instead simply skipped over. How the hell?
When it doesn’t change the meaning of a sentence I’ll generally leave such slips in, but if it’s a noticeable error I have to go back and re-record an entire sentence or paragraph and splice in the re-take. I hadn’t realized that when I started this, but you can’t simply splice in the word that was flubbed. The cadence and rhythm doesn’t match. What’s worse, even redoing an entire line or paragraph, it’s still rarely a good match. A lot of things affect the final recorded sound – distance from the microphone, my energy levels, the posture I’m sitting in, even when I last drew a breath. Over episodes small variations in tempo, tone, and pitch are unnoticed, but a sharp change from one line to the next is jarring. I have to repeat the correct line several times, attempting to manipulate those variables as much as I can to match the original reading, and pick whichever works best. And it still usually doesn’t quite sound right. /sigh
It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, I pay more attention when reading now. Like they say, it saves a lot of time simply doing it right the first time.
But still, how did I overlook a whole dang line?
I can understand skipping lines. It has happened to me often enough before, although I have the luck of reading for myself more than aloud for others.